


Bunker Down

by adeferentaffinity



Category: The 100 (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-08
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-11-27 08:04:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20945054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adeferentaffinity/pseuds/adeferentaffinity
Summary: Monty, Harper, Murphy, Emori, and Miller set out to Polis in hopes of finding a bunker to shelter humanity from Praimfaya. Takes place midseason 4.





	Bunker Down

“Keep up, Monty,” Harper hollered from 10 feet ahead. “You’re the one who dragged us out of camp within an hour of dusk, I’m not waiting around for scenic traps.” They were trekking down the mountain side, 40 minutes away from where they parked the rover. Monty had a hunch, however convoluted, that there was something in Polis that would save everyone. The history of the grounders eluded him, but an engineering mind knew they weren’t “lucky blooded.” Their ancestors had to come from somewhere safer, had to engineer a way to make descendants just like the ark, just slightly less radiation proof. And he knew if it were anywhere, it’d be at the city that didn’t fall. A leveled continent with one preserved city was no accident. It couldn’t be.  
Of course, this was all part of his spiel to round up four volunteers to traipse through the woods at night as not to get caught by blade-happy grounders. Miller begrudgingly agreed to act as a guard for this trip in an attempt to “walk off” his recent breakup. Emori was psyched to join and act as a clear asset to Skaikru which meant Monty would have to endure Murphy for the first time since the early days of the dropship. Raven and Sinclair would’ve come if arkadia wasn’t so spread thin. All engineers on deck was quickly becoming the phrase of the season for the PA system. But Harper was the hardest sell. They’d been getting closer and closer over the past few weeks. After she broke any ice between them by kissing him in their few hours of peacetime prior to taking down the city of light, they stuck to their rhythm together like glue. But there was a definite sadness in Harper’s eyes, sometimes well sunken in, other times marbled in and around her pupils. He wanted to save humanity. She wasn’t ready to wait for what came next.  
They’d reached a clearing that gave awful visibility of Polis, but incredible views of the stars and mountain ranges. There wasn’t too much ash in the air so all the rain puddles glistened under the shimmer. Murphy and Miller were slowing to gaze. Even Emori seemed to loosen her tight shoulders when tilting her chin to the horizon. “Ok maybe a minute.”

The darkness covering Polis whistled every shadow through Harper’s skin. The stretching arches of stone sent her flashbacks of bone marrow drills and radiation alarms and armed guards charging her and her people. If this all led to a bunker, that meant 5 years trapped in a steel tomb. 5 years of authorities deciding life for everyone below them. 5 years of holding her breath every time she passed a someone she didn’t know. Monty was so full of hope she couldn’t look at him too long. He was something so beautiful and all she felt was light being sucked from her. She didn’t want that spreading to anyone, but especially him.  
Murphy piped up, breaking the quiet of strategic footsteps. “So what’s your best guess of where this fortress has been hiding for the last 9 decades?”  
“In the tunnel system.” Monty’s jaw was so clenched responding to Murphy, Harper almost broke her smirk to laugh. He’d bitched to her the night he reappeared in arkadia but managed to avoid him the last couple of weeks. Emori was pretty adept with the radios and tablets she’d been using which caught Sinclair’s eye. He convinced Raven to co-mentor her leading Monty to very specific shifts as to avoid crossing paths too much with the guy who tried to murder his best friend for snoring. It was a new facet of Monty she’d never gotten to see: bitterness. It was electrifying but terrifying for the girl whose path was leading her to a perfect perpendicularity to his.  
“How do you expect us to get passed the grounder guards?” Miller questioned.  
“We go in through the village tunnel. According to Octavia, it’s not heavily monitored since so many people live there anyway. We’re not gonna be anywhere near night watch.”  
Always a plan. She hated he was charming. But the hate was muddled with reverence, trust, and joy. The perfect suffocation cocktail.  
“It’s gotta be near the temple’s building,” Emori offered. “It goes farther down than most of the tunnels and could hold the most people above ground.” She may have grown up exiled and in a world that rejected technology, but Emori was clearly intelligent. Monty nodded for them to head to the temple, impressed by Emori’s understanding the exact logistics he was thinking of. The stern mood she’d been wearing since they left arkadia couldn’t hold back her fearful glee of affirmation.  
“Is this what we’re looking for?” Miller said pointing at a 2-feet thick, heavily mechanized door, permanently resting angled in the doorway as all hinges and wiring were long dead. Not 8 feet from the temple doors, another gateway to history lay solemn, uncelebrated. Monty and Emori walk through to the room hidden behind this screaming red herring, like they were begging curiosity to be their grim reapers. Oh yeah, reapers. Murphy followed Emori’s trail, taking one last scan to his back before full immersion. Miller looked to Harper, frozen in place save her pointer finger wobbling near the trigger of her rifle. “You see something?” he asked, slightly nervous himself.   
She realized she hadn’t spoken in a long time. Observing from the back was easier than facing the unknown head first. But there’s no time for that. “No… It’s clear. After you.”

The room was massive. An exaggerated ceiling hung over the seemingly featureless box. Some furniture lit up when lanterns got to the left third of the floor, but Monty lasered in on the four control panels lining the walls. One was busted but the other three seemed intact. The only thing missing was a bunker door.  
“These panels are probably redundancies, maybe a security measure.” Monty said.  
“Can’t have everyone finding the key,” Murphy quipped, annoying Monty with his accuracy. “Now where’s the rest of it?”  
Emori was already rifling around the furnishings when she said, “Help me check under these tables.” Everyone started shuffling the tables out of the center of the room, revealing an asymmetric pattern in the concrete. There were routine lines sectioning the room vertically every 7 feet, but shifted to the south side of the room was a haphazard rectangular slab between two lines. Whatever was under there was not wanted to be reopened. Monty couldn’t care less. He started digging through his bag that was stuffed to the brim, weighing him down the trip.   
“You have a jackhammer in there?” Harper asked, raising her eyebrows despite her stress.  
“Nope. But we’re gonna need any rags we can get.” No one knew what he was alluding to but they all complied, digging the scraps of fabric they could pull from the chairs in the room and all the liners they’d packed with them. He knew from screwing around with Jasper as a kid that even concrete, which happened to coat most of the ark’s interior, could dissolve with the right elixir.  
To Harper’s horror, Monty opened his water bottled and started dropping in hydrochloric acid. “What the hell are you doing? We only have supplies for the night!”  
“We can’t break this open. The noise from trying would get us killed and a bunker will be heavily enforced anyway. But we can melt it.” He pulled a mallet from the bag and started tapping from the center of the rectangle outward. When he heard the right tone change, he marked out the border of a square. “Ok. I’m gonna start pouring the acid solution outside the border. You need to start brushing and get the acid through the layers until you’re through the concrete.”  
“How are we gonna get the center out?” Miller asked, balling up rags.  
“If we’re lucky, they poured onto a tarp. If not-”  
“In the likely event that we’re not,” Murphy interjected.  
Sighing, Monty continued, “If we’re not, we’ll make a webbing pattern through the center and break it out in sections.”  
The solution began its devouring magic before their eyes as they rubbed it into the pores of this mausoleum. A 5 to 10 centimeter chasm was created exposing the raised edges of a metallic unit resting below.  
“Is that our door?” Emori said, spellbound by hope.  
Monty examined it closely. No tarp. No hinges. Not even sunken into the floor. This could be perfect. Or it could be fatal.  
He jaunted to the closest control panel, exposed the back wiring, and attached a battery. Becca’s handiwork everywhere. The faceplate came to life. Harper came up behind him, put a worried hand on his shoulder.  
“What does this mean?” she asks, pleading eyes sewing into his.  
“It means there’s a home for us.” And with that, he tapped about 14 more commands into the tablet. A pressure release poured out from the edges of their excavation site. A steel coated elevator purred up to the floor. Every eye in the room widened to their maximum.  
Murphy placed an unsteady foot closer to this brand new can of worms. “Let’s go in.”  
Monty typed in the internal door opener. Murphy took Emori’s hand and they strolled in this modern time capsule, bathed in cool blue light. Miller stepped in, secretly hoping the floor wouldn’t rock because he knew he’d lose it. No amount of time in space made him like the idea of weightlessness. Monty finally reached for Harper. She cautiously slung her rifle to her back and grabbed Monty’s soft winter glove. Now or never, like always.  
Before they could descend, Emori started breathing heavily, scanning everywhere and at everyone.  
“What’s wrong?” Harper asked, concern furrowing her brow.  
“My glove. I can’t find it,” she said squirming past the tightly packed team. Her voice was breaking in and out. “I took it off to move wipe the floors. I-I can’t go down there.”   
Murphy hurried to her side, “We’ll find it. You look around rags, I’ll look by the tables.”  
Stress was building as light had been shifting outside the hall for the past half hour. They were both clamoring to look when lights came closer towards their door. They hadn’t even shut down their lanterns yet.  
“I found it!” Emori shouted, behind the elevator. This brought lights closer and more organized, the sound of stomping feet singing with the chorus. She ran over to the elevator but Murphy was still enveloped in the table calamity they made upon their entrance. Any yelling would get them caught faster. A firing show would get their people killed.  
Murphy stopped fighting the distance. He crouched down and with one last risky move yelled, “Go down, take her down.”  
Harper couldn’t react in the haze of storming troops clouding her head, but Miller grabbed Emori into the pod and Monty set in the commands. Before he pushed for the door he said, “Tell Raven 3 days.” And before he could admit to himself that he was feeling empathy with Murphy his voice said, “We’ve got her.” And the floor came tumbling down.

*4 hours earlier*

“Do you think hope saves us?” Harper asked somewhere between solemn and mindless as they rested their backs on a tree. She rolled her knuckles up and down Monty hand, taking in the glowing halo of the sunset sky. The radiation was there. Adjusting the hues on the outer edges of the clouds and village smoke. A brilliant feast for the eyes meeting a crushing weight on the heart.  
“Maybe,” Monty finally said. He leaned his side further into her torso and kissed her temple. “It does make the days go easier.”  
She leaned up and looked into his warm eyes, confused at his confidence. He was willing to hope forever. He was willing to hope for her. She leaned in her forehead and met his lips as her nose grazed his cheek. She was warm. And he was home.


End file.
